Digital Diet

I started investing personal time in learning and personal research in 1977 when I read “Mind Inside Matter” and started using Lisp languages. While I believe that adequate random exploration followed by drilling down into interesting topics is useful for career development and enjoyment every few years I evaluate how I spend time and make adjustments. I am performing one of these digital diet phases this week. Hopefully my notes may help you too:

1. One of my largest time syncs is switching between privacy preserving tools and sometimes more useful tools. I love ProtonMail but I stopped using it yesterday because of the time sync of periodically switching my domain between Gmail and ProtonMail and other overhead of using two email providers. While I believe privacy is important in general, in my particular case I spend all my time writing open source software and writing open content books: everything I do is non-private. If I ran a company, we would probably use Proton products, but for my independent open work having just a single simple email system like Gmail is a time saver. (I configure Google services for maximum privacy and security and minimum data sharing.)

2. I spend too much time trying to do too much using local LLM models. This week I created a short list of use cases where local models run using Ollama and LM Studio make sense for my work flows (mostly using small models embedded in specific applications). Everything else is now handled by paying for Gemini and GPT-5 (all variants) and I am trying to spend much less time experimenting with all available models (except Anthropic: I don’t like their business model, but that is just me).

3. OK, now that I have the smaller stuff out of the way, I will address a larger time sync: spending too much time configuring Emacs and VSCode to use many different local and remote LLM-powered AI coding agents and then interrupting editing work flow switching to AI tools inside an editor or IDE. While I do have many useful packages added to both editors I use, for my work flow I am much more time efficient just using Emacs (mostly) and VSCode (sometimes useful for projects with many files) for editing. I am now just using command line coding agents: I am standardizing on just using Google’s gemini-client and OpenAI’s codex when I specifically want help in writing code, tweaking documentation, of brainstorming possible code changes. Splitting AI use out to just command line interactions saves me time and effort. Consider this attitude as ‘anti-IDE.’